A Hot Day’s Night http://www.hcn.org/issues/47.1/a-hot-days-night
New fiction from the author of 'The Windup Girl.'“Pass me that allen wrench,” Charlene said.

Lucy hesitated, considering the ethical boundaries of journalism, then stretched across Spanish roof tiles for Charlene’s toolbox. Warm metal clinked under her fingers. The wrench glinted in the moonlight as she passed it over to Charlene, where she had lifted a solar panel and was fiddling beneath it. The black shadow of Charlene’s body shifted. Metal ground against clay tile. Something cracked, a sharp, vandalistic report in the silence of the suburb.

“Hold this up,” Charlene said. “I need to get underneath to the alarms.”

“You didn’t say anything about alarms,” Lucy said.

“You think utilities just leave the good stuff lying around? Just because the people are gone, don’t mean the electric company don’t want their electricity. Now hold the panel up, will you?”

With a sigh, Lucy shoved her arm into the gap. Charlene’s flashlight flickered on, its red beam illuminating the hole between the panel and the roof. “Hold it there.” Charlene pinched the penlight in her teeth, peered into the shadows. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Lucy didn’t like the tone of Charlene’s voice. “What now?”

“They got it set to close a circuit with the grid current if we cut this loose. Electrify the whole damn roof. Do me a favor and don’t move. I don’t want to end up as a crispy critter.”

“Christ. I thought you said you knew what you were doing.”

Charlene laughed. “I thought you said you wanted to see the real Phoenix.” She crawled over Lucy, and starting rooting through the toolbox. “You know where my snips got to?”

“I’m trying not to get electrocuted!”

Charlene grinned, a flash of white teeth and a black gap where her incisors had gone missing. “What’s the matter? Too much story for you?”

Lucy didn’t take the bait. She kept her arm grimly in the gap, holding up the panel and trying not to think about 220 volts ripping through her body. She wondered if the sweat covering her would make her a better conductor. One hundred-and-two degrees at 2 a.m., and the temperature probably wouldn’t make it down to a hundred before dawn. She blinked salt out of her eyes, trying not to think about sweat beads dripping from her arm and closing some circuit that would leave her as fried scavenge meat for crows and magpies and vultures.

I thought you wanted to see the real Phoenix.

Aimée van Drimmelen

From Lucy’s vantage, she could see plenty of the city sprawling across the basin. In the past, at this time of night, it would have been a heavy quilt of light, ending only where mountains and wilderness designations pushed back against development. Now, though, abrupt geometric holes of inky blackness punctured the blanket. Building-block cutouts of darkness as if a child had taken scissors and started cutting patterned holes, industriously trimming swatches out of Phoenix. A subdivision here. A development there. A whole township, cut right from the heart of the blanket.

In the daytime, with desert sun searing down, the metro area’s sprawling suburbs appeared largely equal. Chandler was the same as Scottsdale, was the same as Gilbert, was the same as Avondale or Peoria or Mesa or Fountain Hills. All dusty, all the same. But at night, these gaps were revealed. Places where the aquifer had collapsed after overpumping. Places where inter-city water-sharing agreements and hydro development contracts had shattered. Places where Central Arizona Project water no longer re-filled the aquifer, and where water wells had sucked cones of depression so deep and wide that others were left pumping sand. Points of failure in an overstressed system, that now showed as black swatches of hollowed houses, where nothing moved except coyotes and the occasional Merry Perry refugee.

Charlene’s Phoenix. The real Phoenix. The only aspect of Phoenix that seemed to be growing.

Charlene finally found her tools and returned to the panel. She flopped prone and dug into the wiring. In the far distance, traffic rumbled on the broad boulevards that crisscrossed the city, but here in the abandoned subdivision, all was quiet except for the rattle and click of Charlene’s tools.

It was hard to write stories about silence, Lucy thought. Most journos who covered the drought spent their time out near the borders of California and Nevada and Utah, filing stories about Arizona barbarism and Merry Perries, who’d fled out of Texas only to be crucified in the medians of the interstate.

Sometimes they wrote stories speculating about who was responsible for attacks on the Central Arizona Project, describing the exquisite vulnerability of a canal that stretched across three hundred miles of burning desert just to give Phoenix a sip of the Colorado River. They spun conspiracy theories on whether it was California or Las Vegas to blame for repeatedly bombing this last critical IV drip, always tying it to the apocalyptic depths of Lake Mead and Lake Havasu and the rest of the Colorado’s shrinking storage capacity, no longer able to share. These stories at least had a few pictures of blue lake reservoirs with white bathtub rings on red sandstone to recommend them. The reporters fed eagerly on the scarcity and mayhem and conspiracy, wrote their stories, and then jumped on the next flight out, eager to get back to places where water still came out of the tap.

Meanwhile, Lucy stayed, and hoped for something deeper.

“Ha!” Charlene held up a triumphant tangle of wiring. “We’re not frying tonight!” Her gap-toothed smile flashed in the darkness. “Told you I know what I’m doing.”

Charlene’s missing teeth: They had first caught Lucy’s eye while she was drinking in the late afternoon up on the rooftop of Sid’s, watching the regulars as they reclined under raggedy umbrellas and passed a .22 down the line, taking potshots at whatever moved in the half-built subdivision that Sid’s occupied,­ like an outpost in a stick-frame construction wilderness.

And then Charlene had emerged, climbing up the ladder to the roof, buying a round for everyone because she’d just scored big, grinning that gap-tooth smile. As soon as Lucy figured out what Charlene did for a living, she knew this was the story that would break open the silence of Phoenix’s emptying subdivisions.

The suburbs were quiet, but Charlene was loud. Lucy would write a little about the woman’s background — and then shift focus, different angles for different publications. She could do one about the changing nature of Phoenix sprawl for Google/NYTimes. A piece for The Economist about the scavenge economy rising from the ashes of the old construction and sprawl economy. A longer piece for Kindle Post that she could keep the rights to. Three stories, at least, easy money. Except that Charlene’s story came with strings.

“Duck!” Charlene whispered.

“I can’t!”

Headlights shone in the darkness, coming around a curve and illuminating their street.

It was too late to run. Lucy smashed herself flat against the roof tiles, feeling like a bug on a microscope slide. The SUV was nearly silent, riding on its batteries. Only the hiss of its tires as it drove up the dust-rutted street announced it.

“I’ll bet you’re wishing you were back in Connecticut right now, writing stories about seawall breaks and hurricanes, instead of lying here waiting to get your face kicked in.”

Lucy bit off an angry response. Maybe she could just explain herself. Explain that she wasn’t really with Charlene at all. Just a journalist doing a story. Not a thief. Not part of the story. Just writing about the lady they were locking up —

The SUV eased closer, rolling just below them. The whole area was illuminated, daylight invading nightscape. Every instinct told Lucy that they’d been spotted, that she needed to bolt.

The nearly silent electric vehicle slid past, reached the end of the street and disappeared around another curve. Lucy let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

Charlene scrambled up and grabbed the solar panel she’d been working on. Started wrestling it down to the edge of the roof, moving quickly.

“You’re lucky we got a lazy one. Sometimes they’re motivated, swinging their searchlights all over, using their damn eyes to look around. Nothing worse than a motivated junk patrol.”

“Are there a lot of those?” Lucy could still feel her heart pounding.

“Nah. It’s way easier, now. Used to be that everyone thought the owners would come back. They kept saying Roosevelt Lake would fill up again, or there’d be enough water in the CAP to share around. Made junk patrol feel like they had a real job. Protecting private property and all that shit.” She snorted. “But the reality is, there’s just not much use for granite countertops or three bathrooms in a house if there’s no water going down the toilets or filling up the sink. These places deserve to be scavenged now, and junk patrol knows it. Biggest problem is getting to the good stuff first, before someone else does.” She set the panel at the edge of the roof. Waved to Lucy. “Grab a crowbar. We need to get the rest of these panels down before they come back.”

“I didn’t agree to that. I’m just here to write your story.”

Charlene shot Lucy an irritated look. “You want to be here when the junk patrol loops back around? Maybe get a smile like mine?”

“I didn’t say I was going to help you ––”

“Steal?” Charlene supplied.

“— take things. We agreed I was going to write your story.”

Charlene shrugged. “Well, you don’t get shit unless you help. The way this works is you put your sweat into my business, and I put a little of my own sweat into yours. We help each other out, right? Either that, or you can go back downtown and hang with the rest of the out-of-state reporters, drink your hotel martini, file some vulture story about Merry Perries getting strung up on the interstate and get the hell out. Your choice.”

Lucy hesitated.

“Can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” Charlene said.

Eggs.

Ethics.

Lucy remembered a J-school professor of hers, Shondra Goh, talking ethics and boundaries and the dangers of identifying too much with subjects.

She sighed. “Give me the crowbar.”

“That-a-girl!”

They went to work, prying up each panel, Charlene crouching down to cut wires and disable the silent alarms that would summon the junk patrol. Lucy handed allen wrenches and snips and diamond-bladed hacksaws, and Charlene dismantled twenty kilowatts worth of solar panels with medical precision.

“You know I used to install these systems?” Charlene said. “Back when people were building them?” She chuckled. “And now here I am getting paid to rip them out.”

Lucy didn’t answer. With each crack, pry and heave, she wondered if she’d finally become too compromised to call herself a journalist. Her and her stories: Before she’d moved down to Phoenix, they’d seemed so nicely compartmentalized. And now, here she was, pulling her truck out of the garage so they could load solar panels into the back. Taking part in Phoenix’s most popular pastime.

Maybe that was the story, Lucy thought, as she heaved herself back up onto the roof. The real story. Not that Charlene had remade herself as a pillager of other people’s lives, but that Phoenix had a way of stripping away a person’s moral compass. Once it got bad enough, you got desperate enough; the person you started out as wasn’t the person you ended up as.

“Hey, Charlene?” Lucy asked as she lowered another panel over the rim of the roof and into Charlene’s waiting hands.

“Yeah?” Charlene took the panel with a grunt, and hauled it over to set it with the rest in the back of Lucy’s truck.

“How come you didn’t leave? I mean. When you could?”

Aimée van Drimmelen

Charlene returned and held up her hands, waiting for Lucy to hand down the next panel. “Hell. I don’t know. Guess it just didn’t seem real to me. Slow apocalypse, you know? In hindsight, it all looks real clear. But at the time?” She got hold of the panel as Lucy lowered it, set it down on the driveway’s hot concrete. Leaned against it. Her sweat gleamed on her face in the moonlight as she looked up at Lucy. “You could kind of see it creeping up, like, out of the corner of your eye, but you couldn’t see it up close and sharp.” She shrugged, picked up the panel and hefted it into the truck with the rest. “We’re good at doing shit like running away from the junk patrol. I mean, that’s a threat you can understand, right? But who the hell thinks about running away from an extra hundred-degree day?”

Charlene turned sharply at a noise. “What’s that?” she called. “What do you see up there?”

Lucy straightened. One street over, headlights glowed. “Junk patrol!”

“You were supposed to keep your eyes open! You’re the one up top!”

Lucy didn’t bother saying that it was hard to keep a lookout and dangle panels over the edge of a roof. She took a breath and jumped. Her ankle twisted as she hit the driveway, but she staggered for the truck, limping and hopping while her ankle flared. She yanked open the truck door and heaved herself inside.

“Get it back in the garage! They’re almost here!”

For a horrible moment, Lucy couldn’t make the truck start, but then it came alive. The truck’s headlights came on automatically, a beacon announcing that there were thieves in the neighborhood.

“What are you doing?”

Lucy killed the lights.

“Come on! Come on!”

“I’m trying!” Lucy jammed the truck into gear and roared into the garage. Charlene slammed the garage door down. Lucy jumped out, almost fell as her ankle flared again.

“Did they see us? Did they see us?”

“Shut up! I’m trying to listen.”

They both pressed their ears to the metal of the garage door, straining for tell-tales. Listening for voices. For radios. For someone calling for backup. A minute ticked by, while blood pounded in Lucy’s ears and sweat dripped from her nose.

With the truck off, the garage was pitch black. In the ­silence, Charlene’s form rustled. There was a faint buzz and then a firefly of light came on, the purple tip of a cigarette, glowing as she took a drag, illuminating her sun-wrinkled features.

“You want?” she asked.

Lucy took the cigarette. Activated it. Felt the nicotine buzz as she inhaled.

“Never feel as alive as when you think you’re about to get your teeth kicked in,” Charlene said as she accepted the cigarette back. She started to laugh.

“Would you be quiet?” Lucy whispered fiercely.

“Don’t worry. They’re gone.”

“How do you know?”

“Junk patrol isn’t subtle when they’re on your trail.” She took another drag, then rolled up the garage door. Moonlight flooded in. The air outside was cooler than in the garage. A relief. Fresh after the black heat.

“Nice night,” Charlene said. “Bet it gets down to ninety-nine before dawn.” She took another drag on the cigarette. “You want to search the house, see if there’s anything else you want?”

“I just want to get out of here.”

“Suit yourself.”

An hour later, just as the dawn was starting to break the horizon, they dropped the panels with a tattooed man who paid Charlene with a wad of paper money along with a Crypto-Cash card. Charlene checked the card value, then pressed the paper money into Lucy’s hand.

“What’s this?”

“Your share.”

Lucy tried to give it back, but Charlene waved her off. “No. Take it. It’s yours.”

“I can’t —”

“You journos always make your money selling stories more than once. Just think of it as another angle on your story.”

She climbed into her own truck, rolled down the window and leaned out. “I’ll meet you at Sid’s tomorrow, and we’ll do it again. There’s a place down in Chandler that looks like it’s probably got twenty-five kilowatts.”

“I’m not going again.”

“Sure.” Charlene laughed. “Keep telling yourself that.”

Paolo Bacigalupi, author of The Windup Girl, has won the Hugo, Nebula and Michael L. Printz awards and was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Water Knife, a political thriller about a water war between Las Vegas and Phoenix, will be published by Knopf in May. Follow @paolobacigalupi

Work on it a little bit. You'll get it. I got it while I was eating eggs over-medium, hashbrowns and bacon at a restaurant in Hotchkiss, a town of less than 2,000 people in western Colorado. The waitress who was pouring coffee asked who we had voted for in the election and my friend and I said, "Obama."

"Oh, well, then I probably shouldn't tell you this joke."

"No, no," we urged her. "Go for it."

And then she took us on a journey into the land of punch lines featuring assassination.

I grew up here on a small farm outside of town. I know this country, rural and isolated, far from the urban zones of Denver and liberal Boulder. In this part of the West, we're mostly small towns of mining, ranching and farming communities. We're what Sarah Palin was probably thinking of when she said, "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity and dignity."

The people around here would agree. Delta County is deep-red Palin Country. As Obama was turning Colorado's ski towns and gentrified urban areas blue and winning the state, Delta County, like much of rural Colorado, remained a stubborn red. Here, we voted 65 percent for McCain and rejected every candidate who was a Democrat. It's no secret we're a conservative county. But this breakfast conversation presented a new and surprising facet for someone like me. I thought I knew the place.

"My daughter told me that one," our waitress said, "She heard it in school. Most of them, they're not that funny, but that one, I had to give her credit."

I made myself keep smiling. "There's a lot of jokes like that?"

"Oh sure, I was getting tons of them on my cell phone right after he won."

"What others do you know?" I asked.

She shook her head. "I can't remember most of them. They weren't that good." She turned to the other waitress, a soft woman with an apple-pie demeanor.

"What was that one about the Rose Garden?"

The other waitress came over, warm and motherly. "Why are they tearing up the Rose Garden at the White House?" she asked, smiling. A beat, and then, "Because they're putting in a watermelon patch."

"Wow, I guess that's sort of funny."

"You get it if you're from the South," she said.

"We've heard the stereotype," my friend scowled, but I didn't want him to cut short our little anthropological spelunking into casual racism just yet.

"So what grade is your daughter in?"

"Sixth."

And as we chatted about how her daughter is taking karate lessons and soccer, and as I told her about my son's interests and acted as though everything was normal, the implications sank in. What these two friendly waitresses didn't know is that my son is like Barack Obama -- a "mutt," because he's biracial. My four and half year old, who dressed up as a dinosaur on Halloween and who can recite the names of continents and who just learned to play soccer this year, is half-Indian and half-white, and he's growing up in a place where some parents laugh and repeat the racism of their elementary-age children, who in turn must have learned it from other parents.

A few weeks ago, as the world woke with surprise to the new face of the free world, I thought, to echo Michelle Obama, that I was really proud of my country for the first time in a long time. I watched a new American presidency take shape and imagined the world my son would one day inherit and was proud that skin color and race had at last given way to the "content of a man's character." For me, there was a deep relief in that.

But now, in this river valley, below snow-capped mountains, surrounded by good smiling people, I can't help thinking of a riff on another joke I just heard:

Q: What do you call a black man who graduated from Harvard Law School and became commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation in the world?

For most of us, the answer is, "Mr. President."

Apparently in this corner of America, the answer is still a little different.

Paolo Bacigalupi is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a writer in Paonia, Colorado, and the author of the collection Pump Six and other Stories.

]]>No publisherPoliticsWriters on the RangeEssays2008/11/26 15:56:28 GMT-6ArticleThe Tamarisk Hunterhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/325/tamarisk-hunter-Bacigalupi
In the desert Southwest of 2030 Big Daddy Drought runs the show, California claims all the water, and a water tick named Lolo ekes out a rugged living removing tamarisk. Note from the editors: The author of this fictional story, a former High Country News editor, published a new novel this week, The Water Knife.

A big tamarisk can suck 73,000 gallons of river water a year. For $2.88 a day, plus water bounty, Lolo rips tamarisk all winter long.

Ten years ago, it was a good living. Back then, tamarisk shouldered up against every riverbank in the Colorado River Basin, along with cottonwoods, Russian olives, and elms. Ten years ago, towns like Grand Junction and Moab thought they could still squeeze life from a river.

Lolo stands on the edge of a canyon, Maggie the camel his only companion. He stares down into the deeps. It’s an hour’s scramble to the bottom. He ties Maggie to a juniper and starts down, boot-skiing a gully. A few blades of green grass sprout neon around him, piercing juniper-tagged snow clods. In the late winter, there is just a beginning surge of water down in the deeps; the ice is off the river edges. Up high, the mountains still wear their ragged snow mantles. Lolo smears through mud and hits a channel of scree, sliding and scattering rocks. His jugs of tamarisk poison gurgle and slosh on his back. His shovel and rockbar snag on occasional junipers as he skids by. It will be a long hike out. But then, that’s what makes this patch so perfect. It’s a long way down, and the riverbanks are largely hidden.

It’s a living; where other people have dried out and blown away, he has remained: a tamarisk hunter, a water tick, a stubborn bit of weed. Everyone else has been blown off the land as surely as dandelion seeds, set free to fly south or east, or most of all north where watersheds sometimes still run deep and where even if there are no more lush ferns or deep cold fish runs, at least there is still water for people.

Eventually, Lolo reaches the canyon bottom. Down in the cold shadows, his breath steams.

He pulls out a digital camera and starts shooting his proof. The Bureau of Reclamation has gotten uptight about proof. They want different angles on the offending tamarisk, they want each one photographed before and after, the whole process documented, GPS’d, and uploaded directly by the camera. They want it done on-site. And then they still sometimes come out to spot check before they calibrate his headgate for water bounty.

But all their due diligence can’t protect them from the likes of Lolo. Lolo has found the secret to eternal life as a tamarisk hunter. Unknown to the Interior Department and its BuRec subsidiary, he has been seeding new patches of tamarisk, encouraging vigorous brushy groves in previously cleared areas. He has hauled and planted healthy root balls up and down the river system in strategically hidden and inaccessible corridors, all in a bid for security against the swarms of other tamarisk hunters that scour these same tributaries. Lolo is crafty. Stands like this one, a quarter-mile long and thick with salt-laden tamarisk, are his insurance policy.

Documentation finished, he unstraps a folding saw, along with his rockbar and shovel, and sets his poison jugs on the dead salt bank. He starts cutting, slicing into the roots of the tamarisk, pausing every 30 seconds to spread Garlon 4 on the cuts, poisoning the tamarisk wounds faster than they can heal. But some of the best tamarisk, the most vigorous, he uproots and sets aside, for later use.

$2.88 a day, plus water bounty.

It takes Maggie's rolling bleating camel stride a week to make it back to Lolo’s homestead. They follow the river, occasionally climbing above it onto cold mesas or wandering off into the open desert in a bid to avoid the skeleton sprawl of emptied towns. Guardie choppers buzz up and down the river like swarms of angry yellowjackets, hunting for porto-pumpers and wildcat diversions. They rush overhead in a wash of beaten air and gleaming National Guard logos. Lolo remembers a time when the guardies traded potshots with people down on the river banks, tracer-fire and machine-gun chatter echoing in the canyons. He remembers the glorious hiss and arc of a Stinger missile as it flashed across redrock desert and blue sky and burned a chopper where it hovered.

But that’s long in the past. Now, guardie patrols skim up the river unmolested.

Lolo tops another mesa and stares down at the familiar landscape of an eviscerated town, its curving streets and subdivision cul-de-sacs all sitting silent in the sun. At the very edge of the empty town, one-acre ranchettes and snazzy five-thousand-square-foot houses with dead-stick trees and dust-hill landscaping fringe a brown tumbleweed golf course. The sandtraps don’t even show any more.

When California put its first calls on the river, no one really worried. A couple of towns went begging for water. Some idiot newcomers with bad water rights stopped grazing their horses, and that was it. A few years later, people started showering real fast. And a few after that, they showered once a week. And then people started using the buckets. By then, everyone had stopped joking about how "hot" it was. It didn’t really matter how "hot" it was. The problem wasn’t lack of water or an excess of heat, not really. The problem was that 4.4 million acre-feet of water were supposed to go down the river to California. There was water; they just couldn’t touch it.

They were supposed to stand there like dumb monkeys and watch it flow on by.

"Lolo?"

The voice catches him by surprise. Maggie startles and groans and lunges for the mesa edge before Lolo can rein her around. The camel’s great padded feet scuffle dust and Lolo flails for his shotgun where it nestles in a scabbard at the camel’s side. He forces Maggie to turn, shotgun half-drawn, holding barely to his seat and swearing.

A familiar face, tucked amongst juniper tangle.

"Goddamnit!" Lolo lets the shotgun drop back into its scabbard. "Jesus Christ, Travis. You scared the hell out of me."

Travis grins. He emerges from amongst the junipers’ silver bark rags, one hand on his gray fedora, the other on the reins as he guides his mule out of the trees. "Surprised?"

Stan Shaw

"I could’ve shot you!"

"Don’t be so jittery. There’s no one out here ’cept us water ticks."

"That’s what I thought the last time I went shopping down there. I had a whole set of new dishes for Annie and I broke them all when I ran into an ultralight parked right in the middle of the main drag."

"Meth flyers?"

"Beats the hell out of me. I didn’t stick around to ask."

"Shit. I’ll bet they were as surprised as you were."

"They almost killed me."

"I guess they didn’t."

Lolo shakes his head and swears again, this time without anger. Despite the ambush, he’s happy to run into Travis. It’s lonely country, and Lolo’s been out long enough to notice the silence of talking to Maggie. They trade ritual sips of water from their canteens and make camp together. They swap stories about BuRec and avoid discussing where they’ve been ripping tamarisk and enjoy the view of the empty town far below, with its serpentine streets and quiet houses and shining untouched river.

It isn’t until the sun is setting and they’ve finished roasting a magpie that Lolo finally asks the question that’s been on his mind ever since Travis’s sun-baked face came out of the tangle. It goes against etiquette, but he can’t help himself. He picks magpie out of his teeth and says, "I thought you were working downriver."

Travis glances sidelong at Lolo and in that one suspicious uncertain look, Lolo sees that Travis has hit a lean patch. He’s not smart like Lolo. He hasn’t been reseeding. He’s got no insurance. He hasn’t been thinking ahead about all the competition, and what the tamarisk endgame looks like, and now he’s feeling the pinch. Lolo feels a twinge of pity. He likes Travis. A part of him wants to tell Travis the secret, but he stifles the urge. The stakes are too high. Water crimes are serious now, so serious Lolo hasn’t even told his wife, Annie, for fear of what she’ll say. Like all of the most shameful crimes, water theft is a private business, and at the scale Lolo works, forced labor on the Straw is the best punishment he can hope for.

Travis gets his hackles down over Lolo’s invasion of his privacy and says, "I had a couple cows I was running up here, but I lost ’em. I think something got ’em."

"Long way to graze cows."

"Yeah, well, down my way even the sagebrush is dead. Big Daddy Drought’s doing a real number on my patch." He pinches his lip, thoughtful. "Wish I could find those cows."

"They probably went down to the river."

Travis sighs. "Then the guardies probably got ’em."

"Probably shot ’em from a chopper and roasted ’em."

"Californians."

They both spit at the word. The sun continues to sink. Shadows fall across the town’s silent structures. The rooftops gleam red, a ruby cluster decorating the blue river necklace.

"You think there’s any stands worth pulling down there?" Travis asks.

"You can go down and look. But I think I got it all last year. And someone had already been through before me, so I doubt much is coming up."

"Shit. Well, maybe I’ll go shopping. Might as well get something out of this trip."

"There sure isn’t anyone to stop you."

As if to emphasize the fact, the thud-thwap of a guardie chopper breaks the evening silence. The black-fly dot of its movement barely shows against the darkening sky. Soon it’s out of sight and cricket chirps swallow the last evidence of its passing.

Stan Shaw

Travis laughs. "Remember when the guardies said they’d keep out looters? I saw them on TV with all their choppers and Humvees and them all saying they were going to protect everything until the situation improved." He laughs again. "You remember that? All of them driving up and down the streets?"

"I remember."

"Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t have fought them more."

"Annie was in Lake Havasu City when they fought there. You saw what happened." Lolo shivers. "Anyway, there’s not much to fight for once they blow up your water treatment plant. If nothing’s coming out of your faucet, you might as well move on."

"Yeah, well, sometimes I think you still got to fight. Even if it’s just for pride." Travis gestures at the town below, a shadow movement. "I remember when all that land down there was selling like hotcakes and they were building shit as fast as they could ship in the lumber. Shopping malls and parking lots and subdivisions, anywhere they could scrape a flat spot."

"We weren’t calling it Big Daddy Drought, back then."

"Forty-five thousand people. And none of us had a clue. And I was a real estate agent." Travis laughs, a self-mocking sound that ends quickly. It sounds too much like self-pity for Lolo’s taste. They’re quiet again, looking down at the town wreckage.

"I think I might be heading north," Travis says finally.

Lolo glances over, surprised. Again he has the urge to let Travis in on his secret, but he stifles it. "And do what?"

"Not for us." Travis pauses. "I got to level with you, Lolo. I went down to the Straw."

For a second, Lolo is confused by the non sequitur. The statement is too outrageous. And yet Travis’s face is serious. "The Straw? No kidding? All the way there?"

"All the way there." He shrugs defensively. "I wasn’t finding any tamarisk, anyway. And it didn’t actually take that long. It’s a lot closer than it used to be. A week out to the train tracks, and then I hopped a coal train, and rode it right to the interstate, and then I hitched."

"What’s it like out there?"

"Empty. A trucker told me that California and the Interior Department drew up all these plans to decide which cities they’d turn off when." He looks at Lolo significantly. "That was after Lake Havasu. They figured out they had to do it slow. They worked out some kind of formula: how many cities, how many people they could evaporate at a time without making too much unrest. Got advice from the Chinese, from when they were shutting down their old communist industries. Anyway, it looks like they’re pretty much done with it. There’s nothing moving out there except highway trucks and coal trains and a couple truck stops."

"And you saw the Straw?"

"Oh sure, I saw it. Out toward the border. Big old mother. So big you couldn’t climb on top of it, flopped out on the desert like a damn silver snake. All the way to California." He spits reflexively. "They’re spraying with concrete to keep water from seeping into the ground and they’ve got some kind of carbon-fiber stuff over the top to stop the evaporation. And the river just disappears inside. Nothing but an empty canyon below it. Bone-dry. And choppers and Humvees everywhere, like a damn hornet’s nest. They wouldn’t let me get any closer than a half mile on account of the eco-crazies trying to blow it up. They weren’t nice about it, either."

"What did you expect?"

"I dunno. It sure depressed me, though: They work us out here and toss us a little water bounty and then all that water next year goes right down into that big old pipe. Some Californian’s probably filling his swimming pool with last year’s water bounty right now."

Cricket-song pulses in the darkness. Off in the distance, a pack of coyotes starts yipping. The two of them are quiet for a while. Finally, Lolo chucks his friend on the shoulder. "Hell, Travis, it’s probably for the best. A desert’s a stupid place to put a river, anyway."

Lolo’s homestead runs across a couple acres of semi-alkaline soil, conveniently close to the river’s edge. Annie is out in the field when he crests the low hills that overlook his patch. She waves, but keeps digging, planting for whatever water he can collect in bounty.

Lolo pauses, watching Annie work. Hot wind kicks up, carrying with it the scents of sage and clay. A dust devil swirls around Annie, whipping her bandana off her head. Lolo smiles as she snags it; she sees him still watching her and waves at him to quit loafing.

He grins to himself and starts Maggie down the hill, but he doesn’t stop watching Annie work. He’s grateful for her. Grateful that every time he comes back from tamarisk hunting she is still here. She’s steady. Steadier than the people like Travis who give up when times get dry. Steadier than anyone Lolo knows, really. And if she has nightmares sometimes, and can’t stand being in towns or crowds and wakes up in the middle of the night calling out for family she’ll never see again, well, then it’s all the more reason to seed more tamarisk and make sure they never get pushed off their patch like she was pushed.

Lolo gets Maggie to kneel down so he can dismount, then leads her over to a water trough, half-full of slime and water skippers. He gets a bucket and heads for the river while Maggie groans and complains behind him. The patch used to have a well and running water, but like everyone else, they lost their pumping rights and BuRec stuffed the well with Quickcrete when the water table dropped below the Minimum Allowable Reserve. Now he and Annie steal buckets from the river, or, when the Interior Department isn’t watching, they jump up and down on a footpump and dump water into a hidden underground cistern he built when the Resource Conservation and Allowable Use Guidelines went into effect.

Annie calls the guidelines "RaCAUG" and it sounds like she’s hawking spit when she says it, but even with their filled-in well, they’re lucky. They aren’t like Spanish Oaks or Antelope Valley or River Reaches: expensive places that had rotten water rights and turned to dust, money or no, when Vegas and L.A. put in their calls. And they didn’t have to bail out of Phoenix Metro when the Central Arizona Project got turned off and then had its aqueducts blown to smithereens when Arizona wouldn’t stop pumping out of Lake Mead.

Pouring water into Maggie’s water trough, and looking around at his dusty patch with Annie out in the fields, Lolo reminds himself how lucky he is. He hasn’t blown away. He and Annie are dug in. Calies may call them water ticks, but fuck them. If it weren’t for people like him and Annie, they’d dry up and blow away the same as everyone else. And if Lolo moves a little bit of tamarisk around, well, the Calies deserve it, considering what they’ve done to everyone else.

Finished with Maggie, Lolo goes into the house and gets a drink of his own out of the filter urn. The water is cool in the shadows of the adobe house. Juniper beams hang low overhead. He sits down and connects his BuRec camera to the solar panel they’ve got scabbed onto the roof. Its charge light blinks amber. Lolo goes and gets some more water. He’s used to being thirsty, but for some reason he can’t get enough today. Big Daddy Drought’s got his hands around Lolo’s neck today.

Annie comes in, wiping her forehead with a tanned arm. "Don’t drink too much water," she says. "I haven’t been able to pump. Bunch of guardies around."

"What the hell are they doing around? We haven’t even opened our headgates yet."

"They said they were looking for you."

Lolo almost drops his cup.

They know.

They know about his tamarisk reseeding. They know he’s been splitting and planting root-clusters. That he’s been dragging big healthy chunks of tamarisk up and down the river. A week ago he uploaded his claim on the canyon tamarisk — his biggest stand yet — almost worth an acre-foot in itself in water bounty. And now the guardies are knocking on his door.

Lolo forces his hand not to shake as he puts his cup down. "They say what they want?" He’s surprised his voice doesn’t crack.

"Just that they wanted to talk to you." She pauses. "They had one of those Humvees. With the guns."

"It reminded me of Lake Havasu. When they cleared us out. When they shut down the water treatment plant and everyone tried to burn down the BLM office."

"It’s probably nothing." Suddenly he’s glad he never told her about his tamarisk hijinks. They can’t punish her the same. How many acre-feet is he liable for? It must be hundreds. They’ll want him, all right. Put him on a Straw work crew and make him work for life, repay his water debt forever. He’s replanted hundreds, maybe thousands of tamarisk, shuffling them around like a cardsharp on a poker table, moving them from one bank to another, killing them again and again and again, and always happily sending in his "evidence."

"It’s probably nothing," he says again.

"That’s what people said in Havasu."

Lolo waves out at their newly tilled patch. The sun shines down hot and hard on the small plot. "We’re not worth that kind of effort." He forces a grin. "It probably has to do with those enviro crazies who tried to blow up the Straw. Some of them supposedly ran this way. It’s probably that."

Annie shakes her head, unconvinced. "I don’t know. They could have asked me the same as you."

"Yeah, but I cover a lot of ground. See a lot of things. I’ll bet that’s why they want to talk to me. They’re just looking for eco-freaks."

"Yeah, maybe you’re right. It’s probably that." She nods slowly, trying to make herself believe. "Those enviros, they don’t make any sense at all. Not enough water for people, and they want to give the river to a bunch of fish and birds."

Lolo nods emphatically and grins wider. "Yeah. Stupid." But suddenly he views the eco-crazies with something approaching brotherly affection. The Californians are after him, too.

Stan Shaw

Lolo doesn’t sleep all night. His instincts tell him to run, but he doesn’t have the heart to tell Annie, or to leave her. He goes out in the morning hunting tamarisk and fails at that as well. He doesn’t cut a single stand all day. He considers shooting himself with his shotgun, but chickens out when he gets the barrels in his mouth. Better alive and on the run than dead. Finally, as he stares into the twin barrels, he knows that he has to tell Annie, tell her he’s been a water thief for years and that he’s got to run north. Maybe she’ll come with him. Maybe she’ll see reason. They’ll run together. At least they have that. For sure, he’s not going to let those bastards take him off to a labor camp for the rest of his life.

But the guardies are already waiting when Lolo gets back. They’re squatting in the shade of their Humvee, talking. When Lolo comes over the crest of the hill, one of them taps the other and points. They both stand. Annie is out in the field again, turning over dirt, unaware of what’s about to happen. Lolo reins in and studies the guardies. They lean against their Humvee and watch him back.

Suddenly Lolo sees his future. It plays out in his mind the way it does in a movie, as clear as the blue sky above. He puts his hand on his shotgun. Where it sits on Maggie’s far side, the guardies can’t see it. He keeps Maggie angled away from them and lets the camel start down the hill.

The guardies saunter toward him. They’ve got their Humvee with a .50 caliber on the back and they’ve both got M-16s slung over their shoulders. They’re in full bulletproof gear and they look flushed and hot. Lolo rides down slowly. He’ll have to hit them both in the face. Sweat trickles between his shoulder blades. His hand is slick on the shotgun’s stock.

The guardies are playing it cool. They’ve still got their rifles slung, and they let Lolo keep approaching. One of them has a wide smile. He’s maybe 40 years old, and tanned. He’s been out for a while, picking up a tan like that. The other raises a hand and says, "Hey there, Lolo."

Lolo’s so surprised he takes his hand off his shotgun. "Hale?" He recognizes the guardie. He grew up with him. They played football together a million years ago, when football fields still had green grass and sprinklers sprayed their water straight into the air. Hale. Hale Perkins. Lolo scowls. He can’t shoot Hale.

Hale says. "You’re still out here, huh?"

"What the hell are you doing in that uniform? You with the Calies now?"

Hale grimaces and points to his uniform patches: Utah National Guard.

Lolo scowls. Utah National Guard. Colorado National Guard. Arizona National Guard. They’re all the same. There’s hardly a single member of the "National Guard" that isn’t an out-of-state mercenary. Most of the local guardies quit a long time ago, sick to death of goose-stepping family and friends off their properties and sick to death of trading potshots with people who just wanted to stay in their homes. So even if there’s still a Colorado National Guard, or an Arizona or a Utah, inside those uniforms with all their expensive nightsight gear and their brand-new choppers flying the river bends, it’s pure California.

And then there are a few like Hale.

Stan Shaw

Lolo remembers Hale as being an OK guy. Remembers stealing a keg of beer from behind the Elks Club one night with him. Lolo eyes him. "How you liking that Supplementary Assistance Program?" He glances at the other guardie. "That working real well for you? The Calies a big help?"

Hale’s eyes plead for understanding. "Come on, Lolo. I’m not like you. I got a family to look after. If I do another year of duty, they let Shannon and the kids base out of California."

"They give you a swimming pool in your backyard, too?"

"You know it’s not like that. Water’s scarce there, too."

Lolo wants to taunt him, but his heart isn’t in it. A part of him wonders if Hale is just smart. At first, when California started winning its water lawsuits and shutting off cities, the displaced people just followed the water — right to California. It took a little while before the bureaucrats realized what was going on, but finally someone with a sharp pencil did the math and realized that taking in people along with their water didn’t solve a water shortage. So the immigration fences went up.

But people like Hale can still get in.

"So what do you two want?" Inside, Lolo’s wondering why they haven’t already pulled him off Maggie and hauled him away, but he’s willing to play this out.

The other guardie grins. "Maybe we’re just out here seeing how the water ticks live."

Lolo eyes him. This one, he could shoot. He lets his hand fall to his shotgun again. "BuRec sets my headgate. No reason for you to be out here."

The Calie says, "There were some marks on it. Big ones."

Lolo smiles tightly. He knows which marks the Calie is talking about. He made them with five different wrenches when he tried to dismember the entire headgate apparatus in a fit of obsession. Finally he gave up trying to open the bolts and just beat on the thing, banging the steel of the gate, smashing at it, while on the other side he had plants withering. After that, he gave up and just carried buckets of water to his plants and left it at that. But the dents and nicks are still there, reminding him of a period of madness. "It still works, don’t it?"

Hale holds up a hand to his partner, quieting him. "Yeah, it still works. That’s not why we’re here."

"So what do you two want? You didn’t drive all the way out here with your machine gun just to talk about dents in my headgate."

Hale sighs, put-upon, trying to be reasonable. "You mind getting down off that damn camel so we can talk?"

Lolo studies the two guardies, figuring his chances on the ground. "Shit." He spits. "Yeah, OK. You got me." He urges Maggie to kneel and climbs off her hump. "Annie didn’t know anything about this. Don’t get her involved. It was all me."

Hale’s brow wrinkles, puzzled. "What are you talking about?"

"You’re not arresting me?"

The Calie with Hale laughs. "Why? Cause you take a couple buckets of water from the river? Cause you probably got an illegal cistern around here somewhere?" He laughs again. "You ticks are all the same. You think we don’t know about all that crap?"

Hale scowls at the Calie, then turns back to Lolo. "No, we’re not here to arrest you. You know about the Straw?"

"Yeah." Lolo says it slowly, but inside, he’s grinning. A great weight is suddenly off him. They don’t know. They don’t know shit. It was a good plan when he started it, and it’s a good plan still. Lolo schools his face to keep the glee off, and tries to listen to what Hale’s saying, but he can’t, he’s jumping up and down and gibbering like a monkey. They don’t know—

"Wait." Lolo holds up his hand. "What did you just say?"

Hale repeats himself. "California’s ending the water bounty. They’ve got enough Straw sections built up now that they don’t need the program. They’ve got half the river enclosed. They got an agreement from the Department of Interior to focus their budget on seep and evaporation control. That’s where all the big benefits are. They’re shutting down the water bounty payout program." He pauses. "I’m sorry, Lolo."

Lolo frowns. "But a tamarisk is still a tamarisk. Why should one of those damn plants get the water? If I knock out a tamarisk, even if Cali doesn’t want the water, I could still take it. Lots of people could use the water."

Hale looks pityingly at Lolo. "We don’t make the regulations, we just enforce them. I’m supposed to tell you that your headgate won’t get opened next year. If you keep hunting tamarisk, it won’t do any good." He looks around the patch, then shrugs. "Anyway, in another couple years they were going to pipe this whole stretch. There won’t be any tamarisk at all after that."

"What am I supposed to do, then?"

"California and BuRec is offering early buyout money." Hale pulls a booklet out of his bulletproof vest and flips it open. "Sort of to soften the blow." The pages of the booklet flap in the hot breeze. Hale pins the pages with a thumb and pulls a pen out of another vest pocket. He marks something on the booklet, then tears off a perforated check. "It’s not a bad deal."

Lolo takes the check. Stares at it. "Five hundred dollars?"

Hale shrugs sadly. "It’s what they’re offering. That’s just the paper codes. You confirm it online. Use your BuRec camera phone, and they’ll deposit it in whatever bank you want. Or they can hold it in trust until you get into a town and want to withdraw it. Any place with a BLM office, you can do that. But you need to confirm before April 15. Then BuRec’ll send out a guy to shut down your headgate before this season gets going."

"Five hundred dollars?"

"It’s enough to get you north. That’s more than they’re offering next year."

"But this is my patch."

"Not as long as we’ve got Big Daddy Drought. I’m sorry, Lolo."

"The drought could break any time. Why can’t they give us a couple more years? It could break any time." But even as he says it, Lolo doesn’t believe. Ten years ago, he might have. But not now. Big Daddy Drought’s here to stay. He clutches the check and its keycodes to his chest.

A hundred yards away, the river flows on to California.

Paolo Bacigalupi is online editor for High Country News. His writing has appeared in Salon.com, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. He has been nominated for the Nebula and Hugo awards, and is the winner of the Theodore Sturgeon award for best short sf story of the year. His short story collection, Pump Six and Other Stories, will be published by Nightshade Books in Feb. 2008. He maintains a website at windupstories.com.

Tacoma, Wash., illustrator Stan Shaw’s work has appeared in The Village Voice, Esquire, Slate, DC Comics, Willamette Week, The Washington Post Sunday Magazine and many others. He teaches at Pacific Lutheran University, and leads workshops at the Tacoma Art Museum, Seattle Public Library and local elementary schools. He can be reached at drawstanley [at] harbornet.com or through drawstanley.blogspot.com.

]]>No publisherWaterClimate ChangeBooksArt2006/06/26 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleIt’s true: Guns don’t kill peoplehttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/16135
The writer says Vice President Cheney’s gun
"accident" is a mischaracterization When I was in sixth grade, my
entire class was marched into the school gym for Hunter Safety
class. There, for several class periods, the public school system
helped us understand the difference between the deer we could shoot
and the ones we shouldn't, the ethics of "shooting your wife's
deer" (which always made me think someone's wife was keeping a deer
as a pet, but instead meant using her permit), and then -- in a
thrilling culmination -- we were taken out to the local gun range
to shoot a regulation 10 bullets from a .22 rifle.

A few
weeks later we got our perforated shooting targets back, along with
our hunter safety certificates, and emerged newly minted soon-to-be
hunters. I went home and told my mom I wanted a .22 for Christmas.

I never got it. My mother's values and my determination
to blow the heads off of prairie dogs were in direct conflict, but
despite her best intentions, my relationship with guns didn't end
with hunter safety.

When I was 15 and abruptly
transplanted to a new city school system from my tiny rural one in
western Colorado, I met a kid named Scott. His favorite band was
"Great White," he wore a desert cap (the kind with the flaps that
hang down over your neck to protect from sunburn) with a British
flag on the top. At a time when I was feeling swamped by a
1,500-student school, he took me under his wing and made sure I was
integrated with his friends and his pastimes (bowling, drinking
strawberry wine coolers, t.p.-ing neighbor houses, etc.). And by
November he was dead in a gun accident that involved some of our
friends and an "unloaded" gun.

He took a bullet in the
head and died instantly. I wasn't there. I missed the moment when
the bullet made a small entry above his eye, and massive exit from
the back of his head. My friends all insisted that they had checked
the rifle's chamber multiple times, that it was unloaded and they
didn't know how it happened. They were just looking over Joe's new
rifle and somehow it went off. They were familiar with guns. Had
used them many times. None of these gun-savvy kids planned on
spattering the basement walls with their friend's blood. But they
did.

And now our vice president has had a similar
accident. While hunting for quail, he shot a friend and fellow
hunter with a 28-gauge shotgun. According to witnesses, Cheney
flushed a quail, tracked it, and fired. And in the process, he
nailed his 78-year-old friend. The fact that the man didn't die
(he's often described as being peppered or sprayed with bird shot,
and having welts like "chicken pox" on his face and chest), makes
it easier for the people involved to minimize it, to call it an
accident with a lucky ending. Here's the thing, though. I don't
believe that you can have a gun accident -- or luck, either --
around guns. You can have gun carelessness. Or gun inattention. Or
gun disrespect. Or gun recklessness. Or gun stupidity. But you
can't have an accident with a gun.

There are only two
things I learned in hunter safety, and they come back to me every
time something like this happens: Know where your gun is pointing
at all times. Know what you're shooting.

That's it. The
first protects against almost every tragedy related to
unintentional discharge. The second protects against the
consequences of an intentional discharge. The National Rifle
Association's "fundamental rules for safe gun handling" say this at
http://www.nrahq.org/education/guide.asp. Anyone who understands
how dangerous guns are, understands these rules. And yet there are
still yahoos who own and use guns but don't respect their
extraordinary power.

Once again, there is a myth about
guns, and now it's being perpetuated by our highest leadership --
the myth that accidents happen. There are none. There are only gun
consequences. It would be nice if our leaders could at least show
enough responsibility to admit that. But that's wishful thinking.
More and more, it looks like we're just a bunch of children,
playing with toys that we don't understand, and don't deserve to
own.

Paolo Bacigalupi is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News in Paonia, Colorado. He is the editor of the paper's
Web site, hcn.org.

]]>No publisherWildlifePoliticsHuntingWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleJust push ithttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/14892
The writer lauds the human-powered lawn mower Twenty years later, I find myself chastised.
The push mower is infinitely better. I use one every week on my
lawn. Instead of a rusty relic, I use a sleek, shiny model from a
company called Real Goods that cuts the grass quite effectively.
It's so quiet that I can mow and carry on conversation with someone
sitting on the porch.

It also doesn't pollute. The only
waste product I put out is sweat, and even that's minimal in
comparison to the amount my mother's boyfriend expended. It turns
out the push mower wasn't the problem. It was the rust. I keep my
mower in a shed and don't mow in the rain. This seems to solve the
excessive sweat output.

Meanwhile, the average gas mower
belches out pollutants. An hour of lawnmower operation produces as
many emissions as a 1997 mid-sized car driven 125 miles. If the
mower is badly tuned, it's more like 300 miles' worth. Statistics
from the Environmental Protection Agency estimate that lawnmowers
account for 5 percent of all U.S. air pollution, while some
municipalities estimate that as much as 10 percent of their
ozone-causing pollutants derive from lawn machinery. That's a lot
of pollution for such little engines. For many cities, it's the
difference between air that meets federal standards, and air that
doesn’t.

Lest you think that I'm some sort of crazy
gas-hating greeny, I should mention that my teenage years in
western Colorado were funded by mowing lawns. I cruised around lawn
after lawn behind my very own gas mower, ripping across green sward
as fast as possible so I'd have money to burn during the school
year. My first summer mowing gave me enough money to buy a stereo
that I still have 17 years later, so it's not like I don't harbor
affection for the high-speed power of the gas mower. But I have
come to conclude that the power of the gas mower is perhaps its
greatest fault.

As I roared over people's lawns, I never
knew what I was going to hit. I mowed over sticks, hidden rocks, a
dead squirrel, and once, in a jarring shriek, a cast iron pipe. The
mower chewed through all of them and spit them out in chunks, bits
and fragments, and sometimes, because of bad luck and the angle of
the mower, a piece hit me. I never wore shorts when I mowed, even
though it was summer, because I never knew what sharp debris might
fly out of that powerful, highly effective mower.

My
father was an emergency medical technician at that time, and one
call he responded to came from a mother who had run over her son's
foot with a riding mower. My father ended up frantically combing
through a newly mown lawn, hunting for the boy's toes. You have to
wonder about a technology that creates that much hazard just so we
can make a bunch of plants look tidy.

With my pushmower,
I can jam my hand into the thing and come out with my fingers still
attached. I like that in a mower. It knows its place.

Doubters may say that power mowers are best because they save so
much effort. And you'd be right; they do. Just as I sat on my porch
as a kid and watched a man labor over his push mower, anyone can
now catch me mowing and see the sweat on my brow and observe how I
lean into my mower far more than anyone does with a gas-powered
machine.

Using calories instead of gasoline to cut a lawn
will always take more effort. You always sweat a little more, and
work a little harder when you use a push mower. But if we're honest
with ourselves and look around at our sprawling bellies and
flab-swaddled limbs, calories are the one kind of energy that
America doesn't seem to lack.

Paolo Bacigalupi
is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org) in Paonia, Colorado, where he lives and works as a
webmaster for the paper.

]]>No publisherPollutionWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleHave another pig-brain/beef-blood/chicken-spine hamburgerhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/266/14512
Now that mad cow disease is here, even carnivores have to
think twice before biting into a hamburger, because the odds are
that it’s not really a hamburger after allI ate my final diner burger the other day. It’s not that I don’t like burgers (my last one was juicy pure delight) or that I want to become a vegetarian (the tofu diet isn’t for me), but thanks to some recent discoveries, I no longer believe that my last burger, was, in fact, a burger.

We all know the saying, "You are what you eat." Unfortunately, if we peel back the skin of the American meat industry, we find that whatever we eat is what our cow ate, and our cows eat some mighty interesting things. They aren’t grain-fed, or corn-fed or even grass-fed. Our calves drink bovine blood as a "milk replacer," and our cows dine on the ground-up remains of chickens and pigs that were fattened on brains, spines, bones and remnant body parts mechanically pulled from other cows.

This would be so much aesthetic whining, except that meat-eating bovines make ideal candidates for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), aka mad cow disease, the trendiest food-borne illness since E.coli. People who eat these diseased cows can contract Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a Germanic-sounding punishment for doing things God never intended.

It’s hard not to put a biblical Finger-of-God spin on BSE and its human variant. If ever there was a sin, the unholy act of feeding brains, spines, bones and blood back to cows is so steeped in moral and aesthetic nastiness that CJD, a disease which literally chews the brain apart, seems the only possible outcome. We have turned against nature, and now nature has turned against us.

Our president says he’s still eating beef, and the USDA has just announced a ban on serving "downer animals," those too sick to walk to their slaughter, and the meat industry keeps telling us the risk of mad cow disease is low, low, low. But I don’t think I’ll relax just yet.

Consider this: Our first mad cow case was discovered not because we successfully screened for it — we test only 20,000 cows out of 35 million — but because the animal in question showed other, unrelated problems, and so was classified a downer. If this cow had still been walking — and many cows afflicted with mad cow disease walk just fine, for a while — it would never have been discovered.

We talk about this mad cow as though it stayed intact. It didn’t. It became steaks and burgers and had to be recalled from eight different states along with 10,000 pounds of other affected meat long after we discovered it was infected. Some of that meat never came back. People ate it.

Another item: According to Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a book on industrial food-preparation practices, your average hamburger contains the meat of up to 100 cows. So one infected cow can end up in a lot of burgers. And according to The New York Times, a Department of Agriculture study found that in some meat-processing plants, 35 percent of processed meat tested positive for central nervous system tissue (the bits that carry mad cow disease). That’s a lot of suspect spinal cord whirring around our meatpacking system.

The National Cattleman’s Beef Association apparently cares little for public health, even fighting the meager fixes the USDA recently installed, but it understands dollars. So instead of buying their suspect meat, I’m buying meat from cows fed on hay and grass and corn.

Organic and natural-food markets sell beef raised on these vegetarian diets. Our local meat market sells grass-fed beef raised by local ranchers. They say, "You can drive right past our herd and see what we’re feeding them."

They provide an alternative to the industrial meat pipeline, because these western Colorado ranchers know their cows, they feed them well, and they can track them in minutes rather than weeks. The beef is good and you can trust it. If our industrial meat factories lose enough money, they’ll discover that trust counts for a lot.

Paolo Bacigalupi is a contributor to Writers on the Range in Paonia, Colorado, and is online editor for High Country News.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the RangeEssays2004/01/19 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleHave another pig-brain/beef-blood/chicken-spine
hamburgerhttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/14514
Paolo Bacigalupi looks inside his last burger and vows,
"No more!" We all know the saying, "You are what you eat."
Unfortunately, if we peel back the skin of the American meat
industry, we find that whatever we eat is what our cow ate, and our
cows eat some mighty interesting things. They aren't grain-fed, or
corn-fed or even grass-fed. Our calves drink bovine blood as a
"milk replacer," and our cows dine on the ground-up remains of
chickens and pigs that were fattened on brains, spines, bones and
remnant body parts mechanically pulled from other cows.

This would be so much aesthetic whining, except
that meat-eating bovines make ideal candidates for bovine
spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), aka mad cow disease, the trendiest
food-borne illness since e.Coli. People who eat these diseased cows
can contract Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease, a Germanic-sounding
punishment for doing things God never intended.

It's hard
not to put a biblical Finger-of-God spin on BSE and its human
variant. If ever there was a sin, the unholy act of feeding brains,
spines, bones and blood back to cows is so steeped in moral and
aesthetic nastiness that CJD, a disease which literally chews the
brain apart, seems the only possible outcome. We have turned
against nature, and now nature has turned against us.

Our
president says he's still eating beef, and the USDA has just
announced a ban on serving "downer animals," those too sick to walk
to their slaughter, and the meat industry keeps telling us the risk
of mad cow disease is low, low, low. But I don't think I'll relax
just yet.

Consider this: Our first mad cow case was
discovered not because we successfully screened for it -- we test
only 20,000 cows out of 35 million -- but because the animal in
question showed other, unrelated problems, and so was classified a
downer. If this cow had still been walking -- and many cows
afflicted with mad cow disease walk just fine, for a while -- it
would never have been discovered.

We talk about this mad
cow as though it stayed intact. It didn't. It became steaks and
burgers and had to be recalled from eight different states along
with 10,000 pounds of other affected meat long after we discovered
it was infected. Some of that meat never came back. People ate
it.

Another item: According to Eric Schlosser’s Fast
Food Nation, a book on industrial food-preparation practices, your
average hamburger contains the meat of up to 100 cows. So one
infected cow can end up in a lot of burgers. And according to the
New York Times, a Department of Agriculture study found that in
some meat-processing plants, 35 percent of processed meat tested
positive for central nervous system tissue (the bits that carry mad
cow disease). That's a lot of suspect spinal cord whirring around
our meatpacking system.

With our meat industry's unnatural
cattle-raising habits, inadequate screening, promiscuous meat
mixing and casual attitude toward neurological tissue, every USDA
choice burger starts looking like a madcow burger. If cows were
meant to eat meat, they’d run fast and have sharp teeth, and
we’d read "The Boy Who Cried Cow" for a fable.

The
National Cattleman's Beef Association apparently cares little for
public health, even fighting the meager fixes the USDA recently
installed, but it understands dollars. So instead of buying their
suspect meat, I'm buying meat from cows fed on hay and grass and
corn.

Organic and natural-food markets sell beef raised on
these vegetarian diets. Our local meat market sells grass-fed beef
raised by local ranchers. They say, "You can drive right past our
herd and see what we're feeding them."

They provide an
alternative to the industrial meat pipeline because these western
Colorado ranchers know their cows, they feed them well and they can
track them in minutes rather than weeks. The beef is good and you
can trust it. If our industrial meat factories lose enough money,
they'll discover that trust counts for a lot.

Paolo Bacigalupi is a contributor to Writers on the Range
in Paonia, Colorado, a service of High Country News (hcn.org) where
he works as the paper’s webmaster.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleLiving on the sharp edge of diversityhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/243/13718
In a small Western Colorado town, dark-skinned people
stand out with the clarity of bull’s-eyes.Blake told us about the killings when we returned from vacation.

As we pulled away from Denver International Airport’s glowing tent terminal, he said, "There was a shooting in Rifle. Four people got killed at the City Market. It looks like the guy was going after Mexicans." I glanced at Anjula, my wife. She stared straight through the windshield, apparently absorbed in the weave of red taillights ahead. Her skin, a rich nutty brown, was almost black in the car’s darkness. My friend Blake kept talking, sharing more bloody details, unaware of the anxiety ballooning in his car.

Anjula and I didn’t have to speak to know what the other was thinking. Our town wasn’t far from Rifle. We had a City Market of our own. Anjula had been mistaken for a Mexican before.

Anjula and I live on the Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains, in a place of sculpted mesas and sprawling farmland; a river valley patchwork of apple orchards, hay fields and browsing cattle. Pickup trucks wind along thin strips of pavement between the valley’s isolated towns. I grew up in this place. When I was little, I squatted in my family’s irrigation ditches and piled the land’s red mud onto my head. When I was older, I watched the juniper tree hills behind our house explode in 50-foot wildfire flames. I attended the high school where the highest math was trigonometry and where the Spanish teacher was really a wrestling coach in disguise.

This is a place I know well. I see it differently now.

Anjula and I lay awake in bed, clutched together. In another room, Blake was already blissfully asleep.

Anjula said, "I wish he hadn’t said anything about that shooting."

"I don’t think he knows how nervous it makes us. Maybe it’s his way of telling us to be careful."

It had that feel to it: A sort of weather report on ethnic violence. Sunny but colder today with highs in the 40s and four Mexicans dead outside the City Market. Bundle up.

"I hate hearing things like that," Anjula said.

"Yeah." There wasn’t much more to say.

Anjula said, "You’re doing the grocery shopping from now on."

We laughed quietly, a small secret laugh, wishing it was that simple.

We held each other in the darkness, wondering what had driven us to test the fine edge of racial tolerance in a place where dark-skinned people stand out with the clarity of bull’s-eyes.

Fine veins of Indian culture break the smooth polish of Anjula’s American surface, like biotite seaming through marble: the salty mango achar she snacks on; the aunties who call and invite us to weddings in India; the small shrine where she burns incense to elephant-headed Ganesha, the remover of obstacles, and Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity.

But these aspects are invisible to outsiders. She seldom wears the red mark of a married woman, the bindi, on her forehead. She reserves her saris for visits to her family and to her celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. In her daily life, she wears jeans and polar fleece and cooks pasta rather than palak paneer.

If not for her skin color, she might blend with any American community. And yet her skin remains, a stubborn thorn of diversity.

When Anjula and I moved to the valley, we knew that we were testing the unknown, entering a place where minorities were few. The valley’s population was not homogenous: Hippies, ranchers, telecommuters, coal miners and retirees all shared the place. But almost every one of them was white. Anjula’s first tour of my hometown left her uneasy, shaken by uniqueness. People were friendly, but they also seemed to watch her, the explicit stranger.

In town, she introduced herself as someone whose parents were from India, to ensure that no one confused her with the Utes who previously populated the land. She was an Indian — the dots, not the feathers — but more often than not, she was mistaken for a Mexican.

Migrant Mexican farmworkers support our agricultural economy and represent diversity, such as it is. They pick apples, peaches and cherries. They live shadow lives hidden from our eyes. We see Mexicans in the City Market: men in jeans and striped button-front work shirts, wearing cowboy hats or sometimes plastic mesh baseball caps. They shop and leave and we seldom see their homes or communities.

And then, all of a sudden, their shadow lives spring into focus and they are dead in a parking lot, and our own lives spring into focus as well.

Anjula and I went back to our regular lives, convincing ourselves that bad things happened in Rifle, but wouldn’t happen in our town. Still, I watched people differently when I was with her. I watched them as we walked down the sunny main street hand-in-hand, and when we entered a restaurant. I watched them as we waited at the cash register at the farm supply store.

We want to think the best of our neighbors, of the strangers on the street. We want the things we fear to be simply that: things we fear, which don’t exist. Like monsters under the bed, or ghosts in the closet. For the most part, our hopes are born out.

But always, always, Anjula and I are making calculations, guessing at our status in the place we live. It’s uncharitable and paranoid. It’s the worst of ourselves that we bring to this equation, the worst assumptions of the stranger who climbs out of his truck, or pushes her grocery cart into City Market. And yet, it’s part of our lives.

Last week in our town, a group of young white men dragged a Mexican man out of his car. They beat him, robbed him, and left him for dead. Other people trust. Other people live in this place and know that they are safe. We live here and treasure the good days, estimate our safety on the bad days, and hope that we never make a mistake in our calculations.

Paolo Bacigalupi lives in Western Colorado.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesEssays2003/02/03 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleA NIMBY and proud of ithttp://www.hcn.org/issues/233/11386
The term "NIMBY" is used as a term of abuse, but the
writer says that when it comes to things like coalbed methane
drilling on Colorado's Western Slope, he is eager and proud to
declare: NOT IN MY BACKYARD.At a recent hearing on natural gas drilling in my county, a rancher stood before our planning commission and said, "I support President Bush's policies to make America energy independent, and I don't want to be a NIMBY, but ... " He then went on to outline the catastrophic impacts gas drilling could have on Delta County's outfitting and big-game hunting economies.

His dilemma is a real one. Whether it's gas drilling in western Colorado, or nuclear waste storage in Yucca Mountain, Nev., or a South Carolina governor threatening to lie down on the train tracks to stop nuclear waste from entering his state, Not-In-My-Back-Yardism is everywhere. Yet no one wants to be a NIMBY.

The people who say that they don't want to bear the burden of our nation's energy development or radioactive-waste disposal are called unpatriotic or hypocritical. In my county, the pointed attack against NIMBYism goes, "How do you heat your home?" and we are forced to admit that we do indeed warm our homes, light our stoves and heat our water, often with natural gas.

But is this the end of the debate? After all, NIMBYs often say no because they have legitimate concerns. Should they sit meek and silent while their livelihoods, property values, water and communities are destroyed by the gas drilling industry? Should we say to them, "Too bad, you live in the wrong spot. Suck it up, sacrifice for the nation and suffer?"

NIMBY tells us something important. The cowboy standing up in a public meeting to enumerate economic and wildlife impacts to his county is telling us that every time we turn on a gas stove and experience the warm glow of cheap, readily available fuel, we are taking pleasure while he or someone like him suffers the real cost.

NIMBY is the warning sign that tells us our system is broken. It tells us that some energy companies choose to ignore their impacts, either because they believe the impacts are too expensive to remedy, or because impacts are "externalities," unconnected to profits. NIMBY tells us that our government bureaucrats haven't been paying attention to the public welfare.

A friend of mine has a son growing up in the Bronx. One in two children in his neighborhood have respiratory problems. Not coincidentally, a solid-waste incinerator sits nearby. The neighborhood couldn't muster the political clout to force the incinerator elsewhere. If there'd been a few more NIMBYs in this part of New York, my friend's son would be breathing a lot easier today. Instead, he sits and breathes medicine through a mask. He's 5 years old.

NIMBY tells us about morality. NIMBY tells us that some of our industries and wastes not only shouldn't be in my backyard, it's possible they shouldn't be in anyone's backyard. If gas companies and nuclear industries and trash incinerators can't or won't care for the damage they inflict on their neighbors, then we as a nation need 1) to pay more so that these companies can afford to be responsible neighbors, or 2) change the way we consume so that our actions don't make other people suffer.

Knowing how the gas industry behaves in Colorado, I feel differently about turning on my gas stove. I use it consciously and sparingly, knowing that someone far away may have suffered when this gas was extracted.

As for the NIMBYs in my own county, I'm joining them. We're going to fight the gas drillers until they agree to respect our water, our wildlife and our communities, and we're going to fight the Colorado Oil and Gas Commission until it starts behaving like a responsible regulatory agency. We're going to fight until our county is safe from an industry that has run amok. Until things improve, I'm a NIMBY, and I won't apologize. If I don't protect my backyard, who will?